Hey, I want to ask about the practice of wrapping commit messages to 70-something charaters. The webpage most cited about it, which I otherwise really like, is http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html *Nothing else* in my everyday life works this way anymore. Line wrapping gets done on the display end in my email client, my web browser, my ebook reader entirely automatically, and it adapts to the size of the window. That article gives two reasons why commits should be wrapped to 72 columns. First: > git log doesn’t do any special special wrapping of the commit messages. With the default pager of less -S, this means your paragraphs flow far off the edge of the screen, making them difficult to read. On an 80 column terminal, if we subtract 4 columns for the indent on the left and 4 more for symmetry on the right, we’re left with 72 columns. Here, I put a patch at the bottom of this email that wraps commit messages to, right now, 80 columns when they're displayed. (It’s a quick one, probably needs configurability. Also, beware, I don’t program in C too much.) Second: > git format-patch --stdout converts a series of commits to a series of emails, using the messages for the message body. Good email netiquette dictates we wrap our plain text emails such that there’s room for a few levels of nested reply indicators without overflow in an 80 column terminal. (The current rails.git workflow doesn’t include email, but who knows what the future will bring.) There's been a standard for flowed plain text emails (which don't have to wrap at 80 columns) for well over ten years, RFC-2646 and is widely supported. Besides, code in diffs is often longer than 7x characters, and wrapping, like `git log`, could be done inside git. FWIW, there are a bunch of merge commits with lines longer than 80 characters in the git repo itself. Finally, people read commits these days in many other places than `git log` (and make commits in many other places than a text editor configured to wrap). Most every GUI and already word wraps commit messages just fine. As a result, there are commits in popular repos much longer than the 72-column standard and no one notices. Instead, properly-formatted commit messages end up looking cramped when you see them in anywhere wider than 80 columns. Am I crazy? If this makes sense to anyone else, I'd be happy to help massage this into something git-worthy, with some help (never worked on Git before). - - - >From a93b390d1506652d4ad41d1cbd987ba98a8deca0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: =?UTF-8?q?Sidney=20San=20Marti=CC=81n?= <s@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2011 20:26:23 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] Wrap commit messages on display - Wrap to 80 characters minus the indent - Use a hanging indent for lines which begin with "- " - Do not wrap lines which begin with whitespace --- pretty.c | 10 ++++++++-- 1 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/pretty.c b/pretty.c index 230fe1c..15804ce 100644 --- a/pretty.c +++ b/pretty.c @@ -1243,8 +1243,14 @@ void pp_remainder(const struct pretty_print_context *pp, memset(sb->buf + sb->len, ' ', indent); strbuf_setlen(sb, sb->len + indent); } - strbuf_add(sb, line, linelen); - strbuf_addch(sb, '\n'); + if (line[0] == ' ' || line[0] == '\t') { + strbuf_add(sb, line, linelen); + } else { + struct strbuf wrapped = STRBUF_INIT; + strbuf_add(&wrapped, line, linelen); + strbuf_add_wrapped_text(sb, wrapped.buf, 0, indent + (line[0] == '-' && line[1] == ' ' ? 2 : 0), 80 - indent); + strbuf_addch(sb, '\n'); + } } } -- 1.7.8-- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html